Recently in the lab, we’ve set up a turntable and an Xbox 360 Kinect on a linear rail in order to do full, 360° scans of people!

The turntable was built from a $10 bearing from the hardware store, and some bits of wood and hardware lying around the Mechanical Engineering building.

The person being scanned stands on the turntable while a second person pulls the blue cord to spin them around. As the turntable spins, it draws the Kinect up from the floor.

We’re using Reconstructme to process the data from the Kinect into a 3D model. After playing around with some config files to set the parameters of the scanning envelope (to get every part of the person, but not the floor or ceiling), it’s actually pretty easy to clean up the resulting file in Netfabb Studio Basic.

And here is just a small subset of the people we’ve scanned so far:

All the students in one of Professor Storti’s classes have been scanned. They are exploring the difficulties of processing mesh data with a large number of triangles. Stay tuned for more objects processed by our Scan-O-Rama.

The tricky part of this setup was coming up with a way to smoothly and slowly raise or lower the Kinect during the scan. We had an old precision linear rail lying around, which most people probably won’t have in their apartments.

Aside from the linear rail, you just need some clear space, a turn-table of some sort (a lot of people have been using old office chairs, actually), and a computer with a decent graphics card (a MacBook Air with no discrete GPU was completely unable to handle the real-time scanning computations).

So, to answer your question, a head-to-toe scanning station probably would be difficult to set up in the average apartment, but using a stationary Kinect to scan your head and torso while spinning in a desk chair is very achievable.

Julia, glad you like it. If you don’t have a Kinetic yet, then you might look at the Asus Xtion RGB system which works with the same software and gives both 3D geometry and RGB color information (depending on your interest area).

Team UW 3D Printing! Love this… what 3D printer did you use? I assume a Makerbot (which I have on order) will do the trick just fine? (Prof. Ganter — as FYI I was in the ME Advisory Board alumni tour in November and have very much been digging into 3D printing…very very interesting and cool stuff begin applied in many different ways.)

Anders, Thanks for the kind words. Professor Storti & I try to keep life interesting. We have more interesting things coming. As for 3D scanning
and printing, we have printed the results on almost everything we have. We are working on a printer that might be able to print full size people!

Did you think of maybe just moving the kinect itself and have one moving part rather than 2? I was thinking that it might be easier calculations wise to put the kinect on a corkscrew rail system (with something like a 3 or 4 foot internal radius) on a dc motor with optical encoder output running at 8 -10bits precision. By doing this you could precisely calculate area scanned (inside the round, corkscrew rail), the time/distance/speed of the kinect on the rail and have the kinect facing in so it mostly only pics up the object being scanned. Also, maybe build a green screen for the room, or as a booth, so it is really easy to cut the background through subtraction as well as give measurements through the dots. Something to think about… enjoyed. : )

We spent a lot of time thinking about different configurations, and went with this one for a couple of reasons:

– Keeping the person stationary would require a lot of clear space – the corkscrew scenario you suggest would need a room with an 8 foot diameter clear space (and an 8-foot diameter corkscrew!) – and/or multiple cameras.
– Moving the camera in more than one dimension would make some real cable-management problems.

The guys at ReconstructMe.net made some pretty great software to do the scanning – it compensates for jostling and movement, and scans a defined envelope (which did take some calibration, but left out the walls, ceiling and floor when properly dialed-in). Really can’t say enough good things about them.

Nice full body rotation rig. Just shared the post with my coworkers. We use the Kinect-Reconstructme-netfabbStudio combination in our 3D Printing workshop at the Museum of Science and Industry’s Fab Lab here in Chicago.

However we have our guests sit on a rotating stool and only capture the upper half of there bodies. We cut the model off at the shoulders an give them a hollowed bust of themselves.

We could defintely use a full body rig like yours for our own projects though. Great job!

Dear Martin, thanks for the kind words. It turns out that we used a $10 lazy-susan (1000lb rating) from a
big box hardware store and a couple of pieces of chip-board from a packing crate. You could use a square
steel tube or angle iron to make the linear rail with some 3D printed parts and 608 bearings.

Visitors really like to get scanned. A visitor last week was trying to figure out how to politely asked
to get scanned. It is awesome.

Could you leave some details of the procedure. I have all the parts and see I can get the software. But what do you do on the xbox with the kinect and how do you get that data out for use on a computer to work with reconstructme and netfabb. Any type of pointers would be good.

Ron, the Kinect is connected to your PC. Check out ReconstructMe’s web site they provide the system details. We started withthe basic ideas from the Coney Island Scan-A-Rama (http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:28454). Send pictures when yours works.

Has anyone had success with the ReconstructMe software and Kinect in scanning individual body parts with high accuracy(ie knees, wrists)? I require this for my business and interested in any work that has been conducted. Thanks.

Just an idea after looking at your photos with the string, turntable, linear rail. I think a possible cheap solution to the rail might be using a curtain rod from the hardware store. I’ve used the Kinect with skanect and scenect and a desk chair for bust scans with impressive results as well. I’ve yet to test it with ReconstructMe, but I downloaded the trial version and will try soon along with incorporating ideas I saw here. To help those gain an understanding of the pc/gpu requirements for this technique: I used a modified Toshiba Qosmio X775 3dv80 laptop with 16GB DD3 memory, Intel 520 SSD(OS drive) and it has an I7 2.2ghz and a dedicated GeForce GTX560M gpu. I averaged about 15-25 fps during scans. I’ve read on other forums about if you use the Sense and it loses tracking you have to restart, my experience with the Kinect solutions are that you just need the sensor to back up enough for it to re-pickup where it lost. I really can’t wait till some Android based camera solution apps become available and I’m sure someone will start doing something with Project Tango in this direction.

My university is looking into 3D scanners and we are currently looking at the Kinetic as one of the scanning cameras. However, we are also look at the ASUS Xtion Pro Live. Did you have any issues with the Kinetic or any software adjustments that needed to be accounted for? The ASUS is more expensive and if the Kinetic has good performance then we would love to save our budget! Can you do a review of the Kinetic’s performance?

We haven’t used either the Kinetic or Xtion in over a year. The state of the software was very bad. We switch to a Sense. It has commercial grade software and it provides color scanning. It is basically a Kinetic/Xtion but with software that works. Advice == get a good GPU based graphics card as the software it setup to run in parallel on the GPU’s.

[…] Parsons, a graduate student in anthropology, demonstrated another tool. Using an Xbox 360 Kinect with integrated infrared and color cameras and Skanect software, Parsons precisely mapped the exposed skeletons in three dimensions in […]

[…] Parsons, a graduate student in anthropology, demonstrated another tool. Using an Xbox 360 Kinect with integrated infrared and color cameras and Skanect software , Parsons precisely mapped the exposed skeletons in three dimensions in […]